Shutting Down the Fridge

September 20th (Friday)
In the morning we did our standard Spanish lesson time, and then our radio fax reception time. While our weather faxes were coming through I worked on cleaning out our fridge. We have finally chosen to make the switch to not having our fridge on at all. 

During the summer months, especially our first months away from Vancouver when we were actually getting sunshine, we easily produced enough power through solar to run our fridge and freezer. In fact, it was so good that we would often get home after a day’s excursion, and our batteries would be at 100% charge. As the summer progressed, and we stopped getting very much sun, the drain on our batteries became more, and we started having to charge with our generator or our engine from time to time. Eventually we started turning our fridge and freezer off at night, as we found the freezer would stay rock solid and the fridge would not warm up too much. Now, however, as the days are getting shorter, and the angle of the sun is getting steeper, power, unless we want to run our generator every day, is becoming more of an issue. 

We knew that this time would eventually come, and so it is now just a matter of making the adjustment. Many items that we would normally keep in a fridge will be just fine outside during the night, and then in the back of our boat, which does not get heated, during the day. Other items we will simply go without.
We wanted to have goose for dinner again, and we had a bit of room in our freezer, so we headed out hunting. We tried a similar technique to the one we had used last time. The geese acted a bit differently this time, and I think it was because the tide was much lower, so that the areas that had had water at high tide, and that they had been happy to land in before, they no longer seemed to have an interest in.  In the end, however, Jason got a clean shot, and we got a goose.
For dinner Jason breaded one of the breasts and the legs, and pan-fried them quickly before baking them slowly in the oven in a stock. Some of the "scrappy bits" we ate straight out of the frying pan, and they were delicious!! 

When dinner was ready it was a wonderful feast. The breast meat was much more tender than the last time, presumably it was a younger goose, and the flavour was beautiful. The legs were still very tough, so I think from now on we will simply grind the leg meat to have for chillies, pastas, burgers, tacos, or whatever else we choose.  It really is amazing how many different foods we are able to harvest from the land, and what a quality of cuisine we can enjoy. 

The beauty of Eucott Bay.